Emulation Magic!

Emulation software (and, in a few cases, supplemented with hardware) are available that can, with varying degrees of success, allow you to run programs designed for one type of computer on another. Here are a few of the ones we were able to track down recently.

For Windows PCs:

Palm Pilot emulation: homepages.tig.com.au/~sydney/palmpilot.html -- Download your very own free PalmPilot for your PC - Cool! Recommended.

Amiga Emulation: Click here to jump to the Amiga Forever Online Edition Home Page

Amiga Emulation: WinUAE Homepage. We tested WinAUE with an early KickStart and WorkBench combo (1.3) and a more recent 3.1 combo. Both worked well, although this emulator, like the Amiga itself, has a fairly tough learning curve if you don't understand how the operating system's CLI command line interface works.) Once running, though, its nostalgia-city! Recommended.

Amiga Emulation: www.image.dk/~xtpower. See also: Amithlon.com, detailed in part 2 of this report.

Commodore 64 emulation: There are a large number of Commodore 64 emulators available, including VICE, and cbm4linux, to name just a few. C64 fans should definitely check out Contiki. It manages to pack a web server, web browser, multitasking (skinnable) GUI, screensaver, Telnet client and TCP/IP stack (and more!) into less than 50K of memory -- and yes, it runs on an unmodified C64!

If C64 emulation is your bag, you'll want software from FUNET's archive and maybe get a 1541 drive emulator, too. It even supports fastloaders. The best is probably the The Catweasel MK3, but a freely available alternative is available at http://members.surfeu.fi/1541/, along with instructions on how to make a cable allowing you to attach a 1541 (or similar) series drive to a PC. Links to additional resources are noted on the Power64 website. (Power64 is an excellent C64 emulator for the Mac.)

Mac Emulation: Basilisk II a free "Open Source" program by Christian Bauer, is probably the leading 68K Mac emulation solution in terms of popularity and third-party support. It includes the ability to connect to EtherTalk networks and surf the Internet. Basilisk II is available for several platforms, including Linux, BeOS and Windows 9x/NT. An introduction to Basilisk II and the topic of emulating a Mac is described here.  Recommended.

Another popular Mac emulator for PCs is Fusion (Fusion Home Page: www.microcode-solutions.com or www.ctaz.com/~msdei/pc/fusion/fusion.html). It also emulates a 68K Color Mac, although PowerMac emulation is under development. A good page of Fusion setup tips is at www.mobiltom.de/tombin.html or www.macemulation.de.

Note that the registered version of Fusion 1.21 has a serious bug that will corrupt your PC hard drive 100 percent of the time if the drive is accessed from within the Mac emulation via PC Exchange or DOS Mounter 95. To avoid this problem, do not use the "Network" drive mounting feature under Fusion, or upgrade to a newer version to fix this. One user stated in comp.emulators.misc, "This happened to me the first two times I installed Fusion over the demo. My 600 meg, DOS 6.22, 16-bit FAT partition was no longer bootable...." Except for this feature and a complete lack of Ethernet support, it is a robust and reliable emulation.

Fusion PC 3.0 was released on June 12, 2000 and is available at www.emulators.com, which has acquired distribution rights to the product from original developer Jim Drew. According to Emulators Inc.'s Darek Mihocka, who optimized the code for the 3.0 release, the new version  most of the 68040 engine contains rewritten code optimized for execution on Intel Pentium II/III and AMD processors. Additionally, the new release contains Athlon optimized code Mihocka admits he plundered from his company's other emulator, SoftMac 2000 All Intel and AMD processors, he claims, will see a speed increase of at least 10% to 20% due to the overall elimination of over 25K of code. Newer processors such as the Athlon and Pentium III will see speed increases of up to 60%. These improvements appear in the latest release, dubbed SoftMac XP.

In our tests of Fusion 3.0, it appears these are no idle boasts. The new emulator is dramatically speedier than the free Basilisk II emulator mentioned above and reviewed in detail elsewhere in this section. On our Windows 98  test system (450 MHz Celeron, with 128MB of RAM) of a "Fusion Mac" running Mac OS System 7.6, Corel WordPerfect opened in two seconds flat and virtually all aspects of the program, from screen redraws to the march of INITs and CDEVs across the Mac screen at boot time, takes place at a speed that puts Basilisk II to shame. Fusion 3.0 is a DOS program, but can be launched from within a Windows DOS session and does not require you to reboot the system in DOS, as Fusion 1.x did. (Good thing, too - Windows Millennium Edition lacks Real-mode DOS booting capabilities entirely.)

Fusion supported our system's SoundBlaster Live sound card and CD-ROM, but unfortunately lacks network support. So, we'll be keeping Basilisk II around for running our Mac Internet tools, it seems. Emulators Inc. says Parallel ZIP, IDE ZIP, IDE CDROMs, and other IDE/ATAPI devices can all be used with the emulator, which runs under Windows 9x/Me, NT or Windows 2000.

Mac Plus, Mac II Emulation: SoftMac 2000 and its successor, SoftMac XP, are from www.emulators.com. Even faster than Fusion, the SoftMac Mac emulator is, author Darek Mihocka says, the fastest one on the market, especially in Mac Plus emulation mode. It, like Fusion, lacks networking support, but recent SoftMac (and Gemulator, an earlier version) releases have improved upon the program's early bugs and somewhat underdeveloped Mac II/color support. Here's a description of Gemulator from the company's website:

"Our Gemulator product is the world's only real-time Apple Macintosh emulator for Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 that runs the real Mac OS and classic Macintosh programs. Run Pagemaker, Freehand, Wingz, Mac Word, Mac Excel, Mac Paint, Mac Write, and thousands of other Macintosh programs directly on your PC. You can also run Atari ST and Atari 8-bit software, all using one emulator. Gemulator is already used by over 10,000 customers, including Fortune 500 companies and educational institutions. Once Gemulator is installed on your PC, you can simply copy Macintosh and Atari files to your PC's hard drive and run them, even from Macintosh formatted disks and SCSI devices such as CD-ROMs, ZIP disks, and external Macintosh hard drives. No messing with special cables, special disk formats, or other obsolete techniques."

The latest SoftMac version, updated to provide Windows 2000 and Windows XP compatibility, improves color Mac II support and is, according to Mihocka, more than twice as fast as Fusion. Despite Apple's 4MB RAM limit in the Mac Plus and only slightly less onerous restrictions in the original Mac II (original Mac II ROMs cannot support more than 8MB RAM during Mac II emulation), we've used a Mac IIx ROM to support more than 128MB of RAM (courtesy of Connectix's MODE32 utility) during Mac II emulation. Read our review of the company's previous Mac emulation product, Gemulator.

The company has also released a free B&W Mac Plus emulator called WORM. It can be obtained, along with other titles including Corel's recently discontinued and freely downloadable WordPerfect for Mac, at http://www.emaculation.com/other.shtml. This page also lists several other Mac emulation solutions, all of which are less important than the "big three" listed above.

Another recent SoftMac/Gemulator improvement is support for Mac OS 8.0 and 8.1 -- the last versions of the Mac OS to support 68K processors. Unfortunately, there is some question whether new OS versions will ever be supported. Emulators.inc in Sept. 2000 announced that it had discontinued development of its PowerPC emulator, saying that it may consider reviving the project in a year or so, but that performance issues and market realities make the project unfeasible at this time.

A few years ago, a group announced a supposed PPC emulator called "eMac." Don't believe the hype -- the eMac website is nothing more than a repository for ad banners. eMac is notable mostly for the controversy it generated after it was discovered that the public test version of its PPC emulator appeared to be based upon code plagiarized from Basilisk II.)

In 2002, Emulators Inc. founder Darek Mihocka also claimed to be working on PPC emulation again, with a planned release date of mid-2003. Mihocka originally said his initial PowerMac emulation would be of the Motorola PowerPC 601 chip, not the newest G3 or G4 chips that power Apple's current top of the line models. Now, Mihocka worries that the need for a 1GHz Pentium III or better to deliver the kind of performance that would allow acceptable emulation speeds makes the market simply too small to consider a viable business strategy.

Microcode Solutions' Jim Drew, meanwhile, says his PPC efforts will emulate an iMac, complete with USB support. Interestingly, a PPC ROM will not be required for Drew's project. (Jim Drew, for the record, accuses the author of Basilisk II of plagiarizing from him!). Some information on the PPC version of SoftMac is here.

Yet another PPC Mac emulation project was supposed to be in the works, as noted at http://jove.prohosting.com/~macppc/. However, the author has broken numerous self-imposed deadlines and most observers now consider the project to be nothing more than vaporware. So, when you add them all up, there is still nothing to show in PowerMac emulators.

Atari emulation:

Atari ST/TT and Atari XE (8-bit) emulation: Gemulator and Gemulator Pro, from www.emulators.com.

The Official PaCifiST homepage - an excellent emulator, with emulation of the Atari blitter chip, on-the-fly loading of different TOS ROM images (not included, of course), even MIDI support.  We had more luck running version 0.48 than the 0.49 beta. PaCifiST is "giftware."

WinSTon is another Atari ST Emulator for Windows. It's not currently quite as compatible as PaCifiST, but it looks promising (and has recently been updated). It is easier to set up and, like PaCifiST, provides basic sound support, but doesn't read ST disks directly. WinSTon is freeware.

There are several other Atari ST emulators, including Steem (updated in Nov. 2001 to version 2.06) and SainT. both are better than Emulators.com's Gemulator at handling advanced Atari graphics and sound tricks used in many games and demos.

For more info on Atari emulation, visit: The Little Green Desktop.

Nintendo 64: Emulation Unlimited has details on the short but sweet story of the world's first working Nintendo 64 emulator. The emulator, which TechWeb notes has been pulled from distribution in the wake of a threatened lawsuit from Nintendo, requires a 3Dfx Voodoo family 3D accelerator (or a Glide emulator) and disk images of Nintendo 64 ROMs. IGN has further details and test results.

Sony Playstation Emulation: Bleem is a new Playstation emulator for Windows PCs from www.bleem.com. A demo version (which does not support Direct3D acceleration found in the $39.95 commercial version) is available for download.

For Macintosh:

Sony PlayStation Emulation: www.connectix.com. Another emulator also threatened with legal action. Connectix on Feb. 4th announced that the San Francisco Federal District Court had rejected Sony's request for a temporary restraining order on shipments of a PlayStation emulator called Virtual Game Station, and began shipping the product, allowing Power Macintosh computer owners to run some game titles designed for the Sony system. However, Sony kept at it, and on Mar. 11th, obtained a restraining order against Connectix. Undaunted, Connectix released an updated version of the software a day later and now says it plans a Windows version of the emulator. MacWEEK has details.

PC emulation: Virtual PC 2.1 from www.connectix.com (read our Review )

The latest -- and least expensive -- PC emulator for the Mac is Blue Label, from Lismore. This US$19.95 downloadable product is reviewed at www.emulation.net and is, judging from the reports we've read, the most configurable of the Mac-based PC emulators, but also one of the most trouble-prone. However, some users report good success, and it is a good choice for those Mac users wishing to run a PC distribution of Linux.

Other PC emulators for Mac include SoftPC, SoftWindows and RealPC, all from Insignia Solutions. (Review and Test results). OrangePCi is the latest version of a hardware-based (and hence fairly expensive) PC emulator for PCI Macs. Testers report that this product does not currently work on the newest "blue" G3s, a recent software update notwithstanding.

For more information on PC emulation on Macintosh, visit www.macwindows.com/emulator.html.

Atari ST emulators for Mac: NoSTalgia & PowerST. Details at http://users.skynet.be/sky39147/

WACKE is an Atari 8 bit emulator for the PowerMac from www.microcode-solutions.com, the makers of Fusion.

For more info on emulation on a Mac, see The OS Emulation Homepage: www.kearney.net/~mhoffman

For Unix, DOS, NeXT, Windows:

Macintosh Plus emulation: vMac (info at leb.net/vmac) -- vMac can run most Mac applications that require only a 68000 CPU and 4 megabytes of RAM. A collection of old Mac Plus software known to be vMac-compatible is at www.hostus.com/vas. x86 Emulation (including Windows 95): www.bochs.com. Further details on the Windows version at www.v.nu/core/Bochs

For BeOS:

Basilisk II, as noted above, is a Mac emulator for R3/R4/R5 Intel or R3/R4 PPC versions of BeOS. It requires a disk-based image of a Mac ROM to run.

Also available for BeOS: Frodo, a C64 emulator and SIDplayer, which plays tunes designed for the Commodore 64's Sound Interface Device. Details at www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/BBMain.html

SheepShaver isn't really an emulator, but allows users of PowerPC-based BeOS systems to run MacOS applications at native speed inside the BeOS multitasking environment.

For Linux

A wide variety of emulators are available for Linux in addition to the Basilisk II Mac emulator. Version 6.0 of S.u.S.E. Linux, for examples, includes emulations for: DOS, Atari ST, Amiga, C64, C128, VIC20, PET, ZX Spectrum, Gameboy, Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari VCS2600, Coleco Vision, and ZX81 (our very first computer - sigh!). Note that the downloadable evaluation version only includes DOS emulation. Some versions of Linux also bundle the WINE Windows emulator, which allows you to run some Win16 and Win32 applications.

Other Emulators:

• www.softseek.com/Utilities/Emulators
• http://emuzone.fsn.net/emudown.htm
• http://gmga.fractalus.com:9999/zep/frames.html - Links and reviews of Super Nintendo, Sega and other console gaming system emulations.

Useful Drivers:

Mac Printer Driver: ChucksPrinterDriver.sit.bin at www.virtual-pc.com/henners/macintosh/ is a driver that works great with a variety of PC printers, including HP DeskJet and Canon BJC-620 models. It is supported in Fusion (etc.) with no special cable needed.

Operating Systems

Apple has made Mac OS 7.5.3 available for no-cost download (technically, it's not "free" because of the license agreement). PC-based Mac emulators such as Basilisk II, SoftMac and Fusion can use this OS, or versions up to and including Mac OS 8.1, to run 68K Macintosh software.

...and no discussion of virtual machines would be complete without at least mentioning Java. (A topic addressed elsewhere.)

For Further Reading:

• Emulators - Part 2 - Mac, PC and PostScript emulation
• Basilisk II - An in-depth look at this free Mac emulator.
• Basilisk II software compatibility list - What works.
• Sharing files between Macs and PCs. Includes reviews of Fusion and Gemulator.
• Separating Java from the Jive
• www.virtual-pc.com
• www.classicgaming.com/emunews - Emulation News. Recently closed down, but still worth a look.
• If you are interested in programming or emulators in general, don't miss the article at http://www.emuunlim.com/Fixo_Files/tech.htm, written by the co-author of UltraHLE.
• http://people.delphi.com/pbg/links.html  Useful links for those interested in Mac emulation.
• http://www.emaculation.com